Let's Play Moonbreaker

Colin Harvey

Did Brandon have any direct contributions to the mechanics of the game? Is there anything that is solely a game mechanic because of his input?

Charlie Cleveland (from Unknown Worlds)

Cinder is the closest one, right?

Brandon Sanderson

I mean, yeah. I know that a lot of the powers of the units came because I designed a culture, and you're like, "Oh! Explain to me this culture," and I'd be like, "Well, they are warding and protecting, and they revere life." And you're like, "Alright. I'm gonna design some units that just use that power set, derive powers from the adjectives you given." There was a whole bunch of that.

Zax is a good example, right? In my initial pitch, one of my very first pitches [was] for a somewhat roguish character. You see these a lot -- we want to do a space fantasy, you see this style of character a lot. And I'm like, "They always get out of the scraps, they always survive." Well, this one didn't. He died.

Charlie Cleveland

And he's a Han Solo character, he's still mouthing off about how cool he is..

Brandon Sanderson

He's gonna mouth off how cool he is, but the whole joke is he actually died. He's not that cool. And you [Charlie] built the powers for him around the idea of, "Oh, he's a hologram. And he's going to --" I designed all these captains and you built them to do their things.

There is only one captain I designed that you have trouble building powers for. It's the one we took out and replaced with another one.

Brandon Sanderson

Astra's whole thing is she's the daughter of one of the greatest generals and military minds in history, and I won't give you spoilers on her story, but it's hard to not live in the shadow, shall we say? Of such a great parent, and that's kind of her base concept.

Brandon Sanderson

So, Extilior's thing -- since I said what the other two's thing is -- is, Extilior is a giant death robot who recently became self-aware, and is looking for purpose, and has latched onto noble codes from the past as something to give him a guiding light of how you be, you know, created for destruction and death, but try to find some purpose.

But he's still a death robot, you know? He's not gonna right his wrongs by going and making a farm, right? He's not gonna go, the Choleki bots, they're gonna have their farms and things like that. He just can't do that. But he can be like, "Alright, maybe there's a way to walk this balance between what I was created to do, and what I want to be."

SprigLeaf

What are the Reaches? And are there any media outlets in-universe?

Brandon Sanderson

So, the Reaches. This kind of comes when Charlie came to me. What he said is, "I want something that is science-fantasy," and if you don't know what science-fantasy is, Dune is my favourite science-fantasy. It's a science-fiction [story] with a bit of a fantastical element to it. Dune, Star Wars, anything where you've got space ships with psychics. I mean, Skyward is a space fantasy -- a science fantasy. That's what they were looking for, and the other thing he said is, "I want it to be more hopeful, more optimistic." Meaning, a lot of gaming miniatures live in the grimdark future where there is only war. Not throwing any shade, that's awesome. But it's been done so much. If you're gonna find a voice for yourself, you look at what is dominant and you say, "Alright, let's do something different."

Meanwhile, I had this idea for a universe. It was called Soulburner. You can probably go back many years in my State of the Sandersons and see me mentioning something called Soulburner from before I met Charlie. The basic concept was for a science-fantasy world, universe, where it was one giant, red-giant type star, right? Dimmer than a star, but brighter than, say, Jupiter; surrounded by dozens and dozens of moons, set up in a really complicated oribt that requires some maintenance, some mystical maintenance to keep it all going. It's this really intricate machine of all these moons spinniong around and moving past one another, and what I loved about this, as a setting, was little city-states, right? 

We're not talking Little Prince-style moons, but kind of like that. Smaller than our moon, one-city, two-city sized moons that were spinning around. Sometimes they would come in close contact with an enemy or your trade routes would be different, and the other weird thing that I decided for this is [that] I wanted air in space. 

Star Wars does this weird thing where half the time there's air in space, and half the time there isn't. If you go out in space in Star Wars you'll suffocate, but ships bank, right? They use fluid dynamics and aerodynamics and things like this for flying. In Star Wars, there's sometimes gravity in space. Sometimes not. When Princess Leia gets sucked out into space, there's no gravity, but when a ship turns, everyone falls sideways. I don't like this halfway.

We could do better. So what I said is, it's a feature. There's actually air in space. You can get in a ship that doesn't have a canopy and you can sail, or fly, between two of these moons. You can use -- you can get on a giant pterodactyl thing, and you can fly very slowly between moons. They are close enough that you could do it. It would take you months, but you can do it, and you can breathe in space. While there's artificial gravity, the sun provides the main source of gravity. So you don't need artificial gravity for your ship. You can stay on top of your little -- you build yourself a barge and you can stay on top of it. And as long as it's between you and the thing [sun?] and you've got Cinder to keep you anti-gravved up, you're fine. I built this whole cool complex system. I had like 5000 words of work on it before I realized this could just not fit in the Cosmere. There was no way I could get this to go in the Cosmere. So I shelved it, and I'm like, "I will find something to do with this."

I didn't even really build it first for a book. I built it more as just a world and a concept that was really fun for me. I had it sit there. I explored maybe doing some sort of movie with it for a while, and then when you came to me and you were talking about what you wanted, I'm like, "I've got this thing! It's called Soulburner. Let's talk about it." And I pitched it to you.

Charlie Cleveland

You had another pitch too, but I guess we didn't -- wasn't a good fit.

Brandon Sanderson

I had two pitches for you. One was codenamed Brink. One was codenamed Soulburner. Brink was small-scale, because I knew you were doing a squad-based miniatures thing. I said, "Here's the two options. One is more expansive, is more difficult, but it gets you more of the Star Wars universe you want. You're gonna have to deal with the fact that there'll be dozens of moons, with potentially dozens of different species and cultures and things like that. Or you could take this other one that's more narrowed focus." And you immediately wanted the big, expansive one. So this setting is really big. There's a whole lot going on. There's a whole lot behind the scenes. There is a giant, interesting cool plot that we're not even gonna talk about, probably for a year.

You [Charlie] gotta build all the characters, and then we'll start talking about what the actual plot is, and you'll [the player] discover it through the audio dramas, what's going on and things like that. So this is what we're doing. The Reaches is my word for all of this together. Basically, it could replace the universe. It is all of these moons and the sun and all the space between them, is the Reaches.

Bart Thomas

How did the idea of Soulburner turn into Moonbreaker? How did the change from an outline to a game work?

Brandon Sanderson

I'll talk just a little bit about that, though. Remember that Soulburner was a setting. I never had a story for Soulburner. It was all this concept for something. Basically, if I hadn't built the Cosmere, I could have built something like this, a self-contained [world]. One of the things I love about Firefly - actually, it's something shared by Firefly and The Expanse and Cowboy Bebop, which is they worked very hard to make one solar system -- our solar system, I think, in all three cases -- be expansive and interesting, rather than going the big massive universe that you see in something like Star Wars or Star Trek.

Both have their advantages, but not having FTL and by making it all take place in one solar system, you get a few things. You don't have FTL as an escape, and that just makes narrative so much easier in a lot of ways, because you don't have that option. Beyond that, it's very hard to do, in a giant universal 3D escape with FTL, any sort of terrain. Planets being close to each other doesn't matter so much when you're working in terms of Light Years, but when you're working in a single solar system scope, which ones are closer to each other becomes much more relevant. That allows for certain politics in interesting ways and economics and trading. So when I hit on this idea for this one sun with 50 moons, and it's got all sorts of cool aspects to it, right? Like it only rains on one side of the moon, it's because they're all tidally locked. And stuff like that. You only get light on one side of the moons because they're all tidally locked. You have a rainy side, a rainy dark side, and you have a bright side, but it's pointed toward this massive red giant of a star.

So the visuals and the concepting and all the stuff is so cool, but it did not fit in the Cosmere at all. So I had all of this but I didn't -- I mean, I only had 5000 words of it, and I ended up turning in something like a 50,000 word document or more for the worldbuilding. Really it was a matter of taking that concept and expanding it after talking to Charlie about some of the tonal things he wanted and things like that. But there was no outline for a story, that's not what Soulburner was.

Brandon Sanderson

I built Moonbreaker so that the cultures were not factions, necessarily. Meaning if you're Methedori. Your captain is Methedori. Yes, they're space Romans kind of, but their army contains people from every culture, right? It's not like you'll -- and I feel like when I was building Moonbreaker, one of my things I said was that, "Look, there's lots of different ways to build cultures. I want to pick a distinct time in Earth's history and kind of draw inspiration intentionally from a group of Earth cultures." The reason for this being is -- we do this kind of unconsciously a lot, and I wanted to own our influences rather than be accidental at it. Because if you're being accidental at it, that's one step for being insensitive, right?

But if you're being conscious about it, you're like, "This is where my inspiration is coming in." And they are not -- like, the Methedori aren't just space Romans. They have their own thing, but the concept behind them started there. But in the real world, there was a whole lot of -- even in the time range I was using to start my inspiration which is about 500 BC to about 500 AD -- where cultures were a lot more multicultural, or cities were a lot more multicultural than we think that they were. I wanted to [make a world so that] if you're playing Methedori, you can have anybody on your team, even if it were a straight up Methedori. Now you may want to paint them Methedori colors instead, because they're all a Methedori team led by a Methedori captain. But one other thing you have to remember is the captains themselves are not -- they're built to all be basically solo. They're not representing a government. [If] You may have a Methedori captain, you might want to have a team that uses Methedori discipline, so you're going to paint them all using Methedori colorings regardless of which culture they're from. But, you also more likely are going to be like, "Hey, I hired this crew right from around the Reaches, and this crew --

So your crew each represents their own individualism, or you might be like, "Let's build them all together." But the idea is you're a captain. You are an independent captain going out here, collecting Cinder, and going on adventures. That's who you are. You get to decide for your crew what that represents, and what that means, and you should paint them appropriately. I don't think there's any intention ever to be like, "You know this piece that is the Cholek support piece? We will create a different version of it that was the Methedori support piece, so they can all be Methedori. It has the same powers." I don't think there's a plan to do that.